Véronique Olmi - a haunting and thought-provoking story about how a mother's love for her children can be more dangerous than the dark world she is seeking to keep at bay

Véronique Olmi, Beside The Sea. Trans. by Adriana Hunter. Tin House Books, 2012.

A single mother takes her two sons on a trip to the seaside. They stay in a hotel, drink hot chocolate and go to the funfair. She wants to protect them from a cold and uncomprehending world. She knows that it will be the last trip for her boys. This is a haunting and thought-provoking story about how a mother's love for her children can be more dangerous than the dark world she is seeking to keep at bay. Veronique Olmi handles an aspect of motherhood we all too often deny. She depicts a woman's fear of releasing her children into the world. The simple first person narrative achieves an extraordianry level of poetry and inner truth. The French literary bestseller, first published in 2001, has been translated into all major European languages and is now for the first time available in English.

Last week, a woman appeared before Sussex magistrates charged with murdering her two young children. While we don't yet know the truth of that allegation, the coincidence between that event and this novella, which deals with a double infanticide, is too strong to ignore; when such things happen, we crave explanations, and Beside the Sea offers us, if not explanations, then at least some degree of insight.
I don't think I am giving away too much when I say that this book is about a mother who takes her children out of school, checks into a grotty hotel in a rainy, miserable seaside town and kills them. It is clear, almost from the first sentence ("we took the bus, the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us"), that something terrible is going to happen – that this is the memoir of an appalling deed. "We'd never been away for a holiday, never left the city, and suddenly life felt new, my stomach was in knots, I was thirsty the whole time and everything was irritating, but I did my best, yes really my best, so the kids didn't notice anything."
The style is out of Beckett or Bernhard (Véronique Olmi is a dramatist), but the voice is strictly bottom-drawer. It is as if the tone of intellectual dislocation has been reduced to its gibbering bare bones.
This is a mesmerising portrait of a frayed and twisted mind. (One critic detected postnatal depression, though the children are aged nine and five.) The combination of cerebral and literal poverty, not to mention the neglect and scorn of an indifferent society, produces an almost existential fatalism: the mother was always going to do this.
The scenes where she pulls out a tin of loose change in order to pay for hot chocolate or a paper cone of chips are heartbreaking; part of the inevitability of the disaster resides in the fact that there simply isn't enough cash to last more than two frugal days.
The withholding of detail from the (unnamed) mother's life prior to her arrival at the (unnamed) seaside town (Why the flight? We're never told, but we can guess) is a kind of reticence, of discretion, as if Olmi did not wish to presume too much about her character's fractured interior state. But it is also, psychologically as well as ­stylistically, the only route she could have taken. The mother is, to all intents and purposes, memoryless, with no past except for a vague jumble of appalled social workers, her father singing to her at bedtime, and doctors' waiting rooms.

Advertisement

Ventriloquising for the mad, or rather for those who are mad in this way, is a risky business for novelists; for the mad, pace RD Laing, do not have greater insights than the sane, and do not necessarily express themselves any more memorably. On the contrary, their worlds are almost boringly repellent. The only register they have, or the aspect of life that impresses upon them most, is futility. ("Everything was irritating.") To capture this without alienating the reader is quite an achievement, and indeed valuable: Olmi has given us a template with which to begin to understand the mind of a woman capable of doing something so awful. Strangely, the publisher says that Olmi "depicts a woman's fear of releasing her children into the world". To which all I can say is: if this, or something like this, is in any way close to what women think about their children, then we ought to be watching them a lot more closely than we do. I suspect men and women will read this very differently.
But it should be read. When it was published in 2001 it was a huge success in France and Germany. But, this country being the kind of country it is, it takes a publisher set up in someone's front room, for the sheer love of it, or so it would seem, to bring us this book. (Peirene is a new imprint and this is its first publication. However, it does look as though, by printing standards alone, this is a class act.)
When you think of the rather more unadventurous stuff that does well over here and compare it with Beside the Sea, you despair. - Nicholas Lezard


When award-winning French dramatist Véronique Olmi stumbled upon the newspaper headline "MOTHER KILLS CHILDREN AFTER TAKING THEM TO FAIR AND BUYING THEM SOME CHIPS," she embarked on a monstrous challenge: to humanize a woman who kills her own children. The result was her debut novella, a slim first-person narrative of a mother who brings sons Kevin and Stan to a seaside town. She buys them hot chocolate and they go to a carnival. Then she smothers them in their hotel room bed. From the first page, the book progresses like a Greek tragedy, careening assuredly and heavily toward its fate.
The surprise isn't the grisly ending, for within the first two pages, you're a stowaway in the narrator's headspace, and she's a sinking ship: she's careful to tell us that no one observes her as she ushers her two sons, five and nine, onto a bus for an impromptu nighttime trip to the seaside in the middle of the school week, and her eldest son, Stan, shoots her suspicious glares, she says, very much like the ones he gives her when she sits on the kitchen floor for hours, refusing to speak.
There's no such thing as a spoiler alert for Beside the Sea: this family of three is isolated and debilitated by a mother who can't psychologically cohere; her two children will be the innocent victims. Olmi wants us to understand mental illness beyond generalizations of "disturbed" or "depressed" and see the ways that a compulsive, catastrophic thought disorder perverts even the most human of instincts: that of a mother to care for her children. The triumph is that we see the humanity in this situation, even though we may not care deeply about the narrator as a person -- she's too far gone in her psychosis.
The Independent lauds the novel's ability to "enlarge the reader's sympathies" in its cover blurb, yet doesn't explain who or what the object of our sympathies should be; I did not find it for the mother, and sympathy is too paltry a sentiment for the two boys. This is less a portrait about the narrator than it is a portrait of her illness, and Olmi has us rooting not for the mother, but for the eldest son, nine-year-old Stan. Though he is beset by his mother's inability to truly see him, he persists in building a self -- he shows emotional independence from his mother's neglect and outbursts, and tirelessly seeks knowledge about the outside world from sources other than her. Perhaps the sympathy, then, is for the untreated psychosis.
When the narrator complains that Stan focuses more on what his teacher tells him to do and disregards her authority, she rants about feeling belittled, but the attentive reader sees that Stan has (rightfully) placed his trust in a more competent adult role model than his mother. 
I've noticed how kids love doing what they're told, what everyone else is doing. Sometimes Stan even lays it on a bit, saying things like We have to brush our teeth after every meal... my teacher said it. God, you wouldn't believe the power they have, those teachers, they could make them eat anything, they could tell them to walk on their hands and for sure there'd be no more spending a fortune on shoes!
When the narrator complains that Stan leaves her and enters a faraway world when he disappears into the books he reads, she feels he's exhibiting her tendency to detach from reality, but the reader can understand that reading is a healthy escape for Stan, and one that builds self-reliance. She is agitated when Stan refuses to go along with her fantasy that the small tin of coins she's brought to the seashore is adequate. She wants to shield her boys from the despair of poverty and cruelty, but she can't do it by giving them the tools to succeed. Again, the reader knows that Stan's understanding of money shows that he can and will survive his mother's delusions -- if she could only let him.
Stan hits her when she tries to pull on him to leave the beach, and the narrator wonders, "Was it already too late?" The way he defies her, and the way he "walked along that beach like he was used to it" unnerves her because she sees Stan's growing selfhood as a betrayal, and his assimilation into the world and himself means he is becoming part of the cruel world. "How could he cope so well without me?" she asks in disbelief. The narrator's distorted fear and cyclical thoughts that weigh upon her offer her one solution to this problem: to permanently prevent her sons from entering the world, which is the grim solution that she obliquely refers to throughout their weekend until she acts on it at the end.
We can draw conclusions about Stan's resiliency that the storyteller cannot. Stan's last act is a simple but powerful statement of his needs: "I'd like to go home, he said very gently." Once they are in the hotel, Stan reveals that he has taught Kevin to "wee-wee" standing up; Stan is trying to help Kevin, who is still intensely attached to his mother, become more independent, too. And accordingly, Stan's self-reliance confounds her. Bullies at school, who demand his lunch money, constantly beat him, but he never gives in to them. She admits that he didn't learn the resilience from her. In fact, she isn't quite sure who she is, or what she teaches her sons. This insecurity shapes how she sees everything, even the sea: "I couldn't help looking at it... wanted to be like it, self-contained, not giving a damn about anything and taking up as much space as I liked."
She spends her days wishing for "someone to see me." She cannot see herself, so how could she accurately see her sons? Her sense of self is defined by her intense attachment to her children, and her worries frequently become so catastrophic and paralyzing that she ends up (ominously) wishing that her children could stay exactly as they are, because she cannot tolerate or understand any sort of change. Insomnia exacerbates her condition, and guarantees that she is out of sync with the routines her children need her to follow. Just getting enough sleep at night is a frightening ordeal: "Shame sleep has two sides to it: it's a way of forgetting but also a threat." She describes her worrying as if "something's been lowered onto me... like someone sitting on me, that's it. No one even notices I'm here."
First published in France as Bord de Mer in 2001, the book was an immediate bestseller in Europe. In 2006, Adriana Hunter came across the novella and was mesmerized by Olmi's ear for spoken language, and the way she was able to avoid sensationalizing the mother's act. Hunter began the project on her own, without any commission or guarantee of English language publication. She eventually succeeded in securing English publication in 2010 with Peirene Press in the U.K., and won the Scott Montcrieff Prize in 2011 for her translation. This month Tin House publishes the novella's debut in the United States, just months after the stage adaptation debuted at London's Southbank Centre this past spring. Véronique Olmi won the Prix Alain-Fournier emerging artist award for the novella, and she has since published four books.
It's no surprise that Olmi has spent the bulk of her artistic career in the theater: she chooses specific, vivid behaviors in each character that speak volumes about personality and power struggles within the small family unit. We learn that her sons' fathers are different men, with whom she had little interaction, and we know that she gets medicine (which she's stopped taking) and some therapy from a health center. But these expository details fade into the woodwork of her cadence. The point here is to feel just how fruitless the battle with psychosis is, and how as the story progresses, she misreads evidence of her boys growing into their own personalities as evidence that she is losing the battle: "I wondered how long a child could go on being his mother's son, exactly when he became unrecognizable, I mean: just like the others. Exactly when?"
What's so heartbreaking is that the narrator is at some level aware of her thought disorder: though she doesn't state her diagnosis, she describes the "spinning" and "jostling" feelings that are a prelude to the "terrible thoughts" that sit upon her heavily at night, keeping her locked in insomnia. She says she's always been "slipping through things" in life, and everyone -- even her children at times -- antagonize her with their repeated admonishments to "reason with yourself." She tries, but she can't, and so well-meaning advice feels like condemnation to her.
You want it to end, so you can put distance between yourself and the narrator's losing battle, but when you realize, with horror, what you are inadvertently wishing would hurry up and happen in the narrative -- the death of two innocent children -- you're stuck again in a tight, airless spot. Before you know it, you're implicated in what this mother is about to do to her two sons, after a dizzying trip to a carnival where she zones out and can't seem to stay engaged long enough to watch her sons ride the rides. The narrator herself puts her finger on it when she recognizes the hotel manager's hesitation to speak to her: perhaps her despair is catching -- "maybe he was frightened I'd splatter him." The reader's sympathies for mental anguish are enlarged because the narrator's worries are a contagion, and you cannot help realizing that to prevent tragedies like this one, you have to look at the complexities of psychosis instead of distancing yourself from the mother's battle or villianizing her, which Olmi does not allow you to do. She is not a villain, and she is not sympathetic: she is dreadfully human. - Robin McKie


Veronique Olmi has written numerous books and plays beside the sea (Bord de mer ) was her debut novel and won the alain fournier prize in france ,this is her first novel to be published in english ,the story follows a unnamed mother with her two sons Kevin and stan(these are the names in the french version and not anglianized). 
Kevin wanted his pyjamas ,his hotel pyjamas ,the ones with Mickey mouse on on them , and its funny how it reassured him putting them on ,they smelt like home , he said  .Well its really worth the trouble taking them away !I thought , but the smell cheered me up , too, it smelt of my washing powder and of damp ,the smell of my little boy ,I put my head against his neck ,necks are the softest bit on a child .
early on in the book staying at hte hotel by the seaside .
On a trip to the seaside in the usual french fashion in summer when the hoards decamp from the city to the coast ,staying at a small hotel ,they spend day by the beach and on amusments mother taking good care of the boys but there is always a sense of some forbodding may be the mother is to careful ,the real world is a scary place,the book is narrated by the boys mother a lady that as the story unfolds over the 110 pages get more unbalenced leading to the shocking climax of the book .This is the first of the peirne titles no1 .In what Mekie the publisher calls movie books a book short ,yet touching at the same time ,so the reader can sit and read within  a couple of hoours ,it would also make a great commute book I d imagine small easy for a jacket pocket or small bag ,now this story is like a film from the kitchen sink era of films in the late 50 and 60 ‘s ,ordniary life but with extraordniary events happening within those lives .Also the french film le boucher has a similar feel to this novel ,first off everything seems ok the main charcater seems ok on the surfacebut like the mother in this book hides a very dark secret .the lack of detail like the mothers name actual setting dosen’t stop this story flowing off the page ,the beauty of the writing is in the description of the boys and the mothers internal fellings . Amanda my wife wants to read this book too which is nice she mainly reads true life books . - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/beside-the-sea-by-veronique-olmi/

I can live with the sky falling out from above
I can live with your scorn, your sourness, your smug
I can live growing old alone if push comes to shove
But I can’t live without my mother’s love
I can live flying round at an impossible pace
I can live with the bad etiquette that’s falling on this place
I can live with anything you’ve got to throw in my face
But I can’t live without my mother’s embrace
A sons love of his mother Sun kill Moon song I can’t live without my mothers love  , but what happens when a mother has despair at her sons and her life !
can it really be five-year I said to myself a couple of months ago , when I decide to revisit the first three books from Peiene press .They’ve been publishing books in translation as long as I’ve been running the blog and they have provided in that time some of the most thought-provoking books I have read .So back to the book beside the sea seems to be a favourite book from Peirene still after five-year among people who have read their books .I maybe the first time round wasn’t as grabbed as many readers were but this time I felt a greater connection to the book . 
When they were both asleep it was hard for me .The talking started all on its own in my head , I hate that , thinking is a nasty piece of work .sometimes I’d rather be a dog , you can bet dogs never wonder what their place in life is or who they should follow , they just sniff the air and its all recorded , in there for ever .And they stick to it
The mother starts to think over night as her boys sleep
Beside the sea is the story of a mother and her two sons , on the surface we seeing them going on a holiday , maybe out of season but to the seaside as the three of them arrive on a bus late in the evening and find a hotel to stay in  . The mother is unnamed but her two sons are kevin and Stan , she is a single parent we are told little bits about how she had the boys and what the boys are like  at home and together how the older brother watches the younger brother and looks after him .But throughout the book this time you get a  sense all isn’t right  with the mother and the thoughts in her head .This time I read the book noticing a lot more little things that lead up to the end moment of the books ,when the mother makes a decision that will affect her and her boys for the rest of her life ! 
I dreamt of the sea , I remember , of Stan running towards the sea , into the sea , but not drowning, and me with no words left to call him back …  Where was Kevin ? I don’t know , I could feel him but not see him , it was like the sea was only there for Stan and two of them understood each other so well tht it couldn’t hurt him .
She pictures the boys beside and in the sea .
Now I have yet again in the summary of the book , I’ve  not mention the big event in this book because for me if someone hasn’t read the book its like when we told people who hadn’t seen the sixth sense at the cinema what had really happened to Bruce Willis .But in reread the books the clues are there through the books in the thoughts and way the mother talks about her sons .At the time of the first reading I had read a lot less French fiction but now five years on this book is easier to place in the French cannon .The way French fiction can explore emotions and actions maybe even thoughts that a writer has had and never carried out  , but where these actions and thoughts  could lead so one of the first French novels on this blog becomes the 51st French book on the blog .In my original review I mentioned Kitchen sink drama as an English equivalent of this  book , but now years on maybe this book is nearer the sort of film Ken Loach would make there is a real natural feel to the prose ,but because Olmi obviously knew what was going to happen at the end we get little bit thrown through out the story that point us when we get to the main event in the book .I also think this is a book that would have more of an impact if you are a parent yourself , I’m sure many people have felt the despair that this mother feels about her sons .
Have you read this book if not why not ? - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/beside-the-sea-by-veronique-olmi-2/

A play adapted from a French novella about a woman who kills her children is set to become the next cultural phenomenon about the darker side of maternal love when it opens at London's Southbank Centre next month. Beside the Sea began life as Bord de Mer, written by the Paris-based dramatist Véronique Olmi. It has taken 11 years and a team of eminent women to bring this story to the stage.
Beside the Sea focuses on a mother who loves her sons so much and fears the world so greatly that she can't bear for them to live in it. Olmi says it was "inspired by four lines I read in the newspaper: a mother killed both her children after taking them to the fair and buying them some chips. The contradiction between the monstrous act of killing her children and taking them out and buying them chips – a nice, loving, pleasing action – was incomprehensible. This is precisely what writing is about: trying to reach humanity in the mystery of inhumanity. I decided to write through the eyes of the mother, getting inside the logic of an infanticidal woman."
Bord de Mer was a bestseller in France and Germany when it was published in 2001, and received positive critical coverage for its bravery and artistry. It was translated into 15 languages across Europe. However, British publishers proved unwilling and no one bought it.
Translator Adriana Hunter found Olmi's novella in 2006 during a work trip to Paris, and was so struck by it that she translated it into English in her own time – the only time she has ever done so in a career spanning more than 50 books. She describes its impact: "A lot of the book's hypnotic quality derives from Olmi's ear for the spoken word. I could hear the narrator's voice, and I could picture her – picture her apartment, smell the cooking smells and the fustiness of her bedroom on the days she couldn't get out of bed. For me, the subject isn't a woman who kills her children, it's a woman who's not coping with the world. She loves her boys and she can't bear to release them into that hostile world."

Advertisement

She doesn't feel the book is controversial: "It apportions no blame. It gets right inside the head of someone who does the unthinkable, and you come out of it sympathising with her, rather than hating her. It may not be an evil act; it may be an act of desperation or a misguided act of love. All parents will have moments of despair and feelings of inadequacy, though not all will admit to them. Some will have months and years of those feelings."
For four years, Hunter received rejections from English publishers unwilling to take on the project. Then she met Meike Ziervogel, who had just set up the Peirene Press for sophisticated literary fiction in translation, at a London Book Fair seminar on "Marketing Difficult Books".
Bord de Mer was published by Peirene as Beside the Sea in 2010, nine years after its original release. Ziervogel says she recognised its importance immediately: "The story depicts the destructive side of maternal love. It's like a Greek tragedy: it personifies a psychological power which we all too often deny. That's why we like to think of women who kill their children as monsters. And that's why I believe this book arouses such strong responses. Yet after reading Beside the Sea, I felt strangely happy. The book had given me the right to contemplate an aspect of motherhood that society wishes to ignore. The mother in the book is not a monster, nor are her children. She kills them out of love, because she is incapable of realising that her children's reality is a different one from her own. Our society assumes that maternal love is wholly positive, that as long as a mother loves her children, she will do them no harm."
Ziervogel says the initial reaction to the book was extreme: "A couple of weeks before the book was released, I asked a friend if her reading group would be willing to read it, and to allow me to sit in. The eight women – all in their forties, and all mothers – kindly agreed. With the exception of one, they hated the book. Bad writing, bad story, bad blurb, bad picture. They didn't leave a stone unturned. It was the first time I realised that I was about to publish a book that some people might not be able to handle, that this will hit such a deep core with some that they will simply look away. Then the reviews came. With the exception of the Guardian, none of the reviews addressed the subject matter. Again, I was amazed. How can you discuss this book without mentioning that it is about a mother who kills her two children?"
Beside the Sea was reprinted after three months, and longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2010. Last week it was announced that it has won the Scott Moncrieff prize for best translation from French.
But this is not the end of the story for this unusual work of fiction, because next month it will be performed as a monologue, thanks to the involvement of another group of women. When Ziervogel was planning her first book launch back in 2010, Geraldine D'Amico, the director of Jewish Book Week, suggested she invite the actor Lisa Dwan to give a reading from Beside the Sea. D'Amico had seen Dwan perform Beckett's dramatic monologue Not I in 2009, and envisioned Beside the Sea as a companion piece. She put Dwan in touch with Ziervogel, and the reading took place.
Dwan was immediately captivated: "Meike sent me the book, and I read it all in one sitting on my iPhone. I was absolutely devastated by it. It unlocks you from the inside." She was intrigued by the circumstances of the central character's life: "What are the conditions that make someone do something like that? I feel we're all on the scale, and it's about how the stars are aligned, the series of events in a person's life and how people fall through the cracks in society. I don't think any of us can afford to be too cocky about these conditions. I hear the palpable fear of the world in this monologue, and I don't hear a caricature at all. That's why people are unnerved by it. Terrible acts seem like rational decisions when you're pushed into a corner, when your whole life is a series of awful events that seem to be out to personally persecute you. You stay in that horror until something gives in."
Following the book launch, the Southbank Centre's artistic director, Jude Kelly, invited Dwan to perform the work at a literature festival in the summer of 2011. Dwan says that "three people couldn't handle it and left. When the lights went up, everyone was devastated."
Dwan persuaded the Southbank to let her produce and develop the work as a one-woman play. She went to Paris to negotiate the stage rights, winning them after a long and rigorous talk which involved her giving Olmi a performance of her interpretation. "I was alone in Paris, I wanted to celebrate," says Dwan. "I skipped down the street having just bought the rights to probably the most depressing play in the world. I don't drink or smoke so I went into a taxidermist's and bought a stuffed duck."
Actor Diana Quick put her in touch with director Irina Brown, who agreed to direct her performance.
So why has it taken so long to get to this point when a few more people might encounter Olmi's work, when far more brutal and violent stories, especially in the cinema, have become ubiquitous? "The brilliance of Véronique's writing is that you become intimately acquainted with the speaker's thoughts. You're charmed by her, you understand her, you feel her vulnerability, but simultaneously you get to know the boys. You see them more clearly than she sees them," Dwan says.
Olmi says she had one piece of advice for the actor: "Don't cry during the monologue. If somebody must cry, it's the audience, not you. This woman has no self-awareness, she does not try to understand or analyse herself. She is much further in than that. She's within the tragedy." - Bidisha

 . . . its hard living up to a child’s hopes.  Right!  I said we’re going to buy some biscuits and a bottle of water, and we’re going to have a picnic down by the sea!  Its raining, Stan said, like it was my fault, and that was when I’d had enough.
This skilfully written novel, Beside the Sea, tells the story of a troubled single mother, who takes her two young sons for a visit to the seaside.  She describes the long bus journey through the rain to the unnamed coastal town, arriving at night, to book into a dismal hotel where she is assigned a tiny room on the sixth floor.  This is going to be no holiday, for despite the woman’s desire to give her boys a treat, shortage of money and a mother’s trouble mind dog their days, plus of course the unremitting rain.
I was quickly drawn in to this tragic tale, and finishing the book this morning, I found myself full of pity for this little family.  If only someone had noticed.  If only those men in the café had been more helpful.  If only the hotel owner had called social services.  But then no doubt they would have met with an uncomprehending response – they aren’t my patch, they’re just visiting, they’ll be all right.  Alas, they aren’t all right, and we privileged readers see all the clues, the references to social workers, the neglect of essentials . . .

. . .I hadn’t taken my medicine, but no one sat on me that night. I was like everyone else that night . . . I slept like I do during the day.

It takes money to organise a holiday, not a pitiful tea-tin containing loose change “scrimped from the change at the baker, and sometimes the supermarket”.  You really don’t want to take your children to an hotel where. . .

. . . there was a tiny night light on the counter, and everything was brown: the walls, the lino, the doors, it was an old-fashioned brown – the can’t have repainted the place for centuries, and it looked like years of dirt had stuck to the walls and floor.

Véronique Olmi describes every detail of this couple of days with painful precision.  The mother is trying so hard to make things work, but just doesn’t have the ability to do so.  They trudge through the rain to see the sea, but they find, “great waves stretching furiously . . . gathering high to reach us then falling back down”.
They find a café and meet hostility from the owner and his other customers who mutter about the children not being in school today.  What can a young mother do other than go back to the hotel and pull the sheets over her head?  Her boys play listlessly with coins and watch the raindrops falling down the window-pane, apparently well-accustomed to their mother’s withdrawals from the world.
When she eventually surfaces the mother provides a meal of chocolate biscuits and water for her boys and then takes them to a funfair, where again, little joy awaits.  Back at the hotel the heating is off, but at least the rain has stopped and the moon shines through the windows.  The story soon reaches its inevitable conclusion and left this reader at least thinking of all the families who struggle so hard against impossible odds and find only despair at the end of their journey.
In Beside the Sea, Véronique Olbi has perfectly captured the harshness of life where loneliness and poverty represent insuperable barriers to contentment.  The voice which narrates the tale is perfect.  We are not told the woman’s history, but its all there in her speech, the familiarity with bargain-basement life, the little flashes of humour emerging from a tormented subconscious, the maternal love for her boys, marred by too much struggle to keep her head above water.  The first person narration works perfectly and I was reminded of other author equally adept at depicting the outworking of a damaged psyche such as M J Hyland (This is How) or Neil Cross (Burial).
From time to time we see glimpses of a more equable personalty which show what might have been if life hadn’t dealt this young mother such a difficult hand, and it is impossible to feel judgemental about her – would we fare any better under such circumstances?  And its Véronique Olmi’s ability to seek out a sympathetic response in her readers which makes this book work – her readers are not just causal observers of this seaside holiday but find themselves longing for this intractable set of problems to be solved.
A final word about the translation – the book is translated by the hugely-skilled Adriana Hunter (who has many titles to her credit including that notorious book about Catherine M!),  who as always presents a work which makes her readers feel that they are reading in the original language.
The book is beautifully produced by Peirene Press, a new imprint “bringing the undertapped riches of contemporary European literature”.  The production values are extremely high – nice design of cover and content, substantial flaps on the cover and even a little themed bookmark is provided with the book.  Peirene Press evidently feel that despite the alleged rise of e-books there are still plenty of people out there who appreciate the tactile and visual elements of reading. - acommonreader.org/review-beside-the-sea-veronique-olmi/

A young single mother takes her sons, five-year-old Kevin and nine-year-old Stan, out of school for a treat they have never experienced: a trip to the seaside. Almost from the outset, this seemingly innocuous family holiday has a desperate quality. The resort is a bleak, muddy place beside a colourless sea, their hotel room a drab box, the people at best indifferent, at worst hostile.

"I did my best, yes really my best," she protests, but nothing ever goes right. As she attempts to justify herself, we learn that she is on psychiatric medication, spending much of the day in bed while Stan takes Kevin to school. Loving and fiercely protective, she is utterly bemused by the world around her. Attentive readers will notice clues that this is a one-way trip. It has consumed all her resources, not only psychologically but financially. She has made no provision for a return journey.
First published in France in 2001, Bord de Mer was Véronique Olmi's debut novel, and became a bestseller. It has been made available in English thanks to its superb translator, Adriana Hunter, and the publisher, Peirene Press. At a time when publishing houses are battening down the hatches against the wintry economic climate, Peirene are to be congratulated for choosing this gem of a novel as their first venture.
Olmi's achievement is to find a narrative voice which conveys a rich inner life and even a sense of poetry, without resorting to language beyond the plausible reach of her protagonist. She makes understandable and even sympathetic a character from whom most people would recoil.
This short novel has the trajectory of a classic tragedy with its taut time-span and sense of inevitability, as we witness a woman destroyed by a tragic flaw. Finding the world a hostile place, she can imagine only one way to protect her children from it. The closing pages are heart-stopping and heartbreaking, yet one finishes this sad tale not depressed but uplifted by its ability to enlarge the reader's sympathies. - CJ Schüler

Some books you need to write about quite some time after you have read them to let the settle with you and other times a book hits you so strongly that you want to write about it the instant that you have finished it. I am doing the latter with ‘Beside the Sea’ by Veronique Olmi whilst the emotions which it has so strongly brought out of me are still fresh.
I can’t really start my bookish thoughts on ‘Beside the Sea’ without stating that it is one of the most intense reads that I have had the fortune (though maybe that’s not quite the right word) of reading recently. It starts as the simple tale of a single mother taking her children on a holiday to see the sea for the first time only as the book develops much darker undertones start to slowly seep out of the narrative and you realise this isn’t going to be quite the picturesque read that you thought it might be.
To give away very much about this books storyline would be to spoil this book for the reader. I will try not to let the cat out of the bag when I describe what an amazing tension Olmi creates in this novel through the narration. The nameless young mother describes to the reader her trip away and as the tale goes on from the coach ride to hotel arrival, café treats to first sightings of the sea you are given small glimpses that something isn’t quite right. Health centres, social workers, Sundays in bed all day and medication start to be mentioned and the further you read on the more you get that gut feeling all is not well and something darker is coming.
“I like songs.They say things I can’t seem to say. If I didn’t have these rotten teeth I’d sing alot more, a lot more often, I’d sing my boys to sleep in the evenings, tales of sailors and magical beds, but there you are, we can’t be good at everything, we can’t know how to do everything, all of it, that’s what I tell the social worker till I’m blue in the face.”
One of the quotes on the books matching bookmark mentions that though not a thriller this book does read as one and that’s a very true statement. I can’t think of many books where the atmosphere and intensity of the novel come off the page so instantly and leave you to read on even if you aren’t sure you want to. I shall say no more but if you have read the book email me as I am desperate to have a chat with someone else who has finished it.
I know there are some people out there who think that if you don’t have children then you can’t relate to tales about mother’s (or father’s) feelings for their child or children. I think that’s a load of rubbish, I believe that a wonderful author can take you absolutely anywhere, into any mind or situation, that’s the wonder of books. Olmi is just such a writer who put me into the mind of a mother thinking of her and her children’s lives and left me rather an emotional wreck and not any books can leave me almost feeling physically winded.
A compelling book from an author whose entire back catalogue of work I hope will get translated. I would be the first in the queue to read anything of hers that comes out in English in the future, or I will just have to learn fluent French if not, that’s how good this is. It has also made me very keen to see what Peirene Press (a new independent and rather lovely publisher who kindly sent me this) has coming out in the future. This is a Savidge Reads must read book.
P.S I did mean to write more about how this was a wondrous start to ‘Lost in Translation’ and about Peirene Press, but the book has left me so stunned and slightly shaken that I need to go and sit and just be with people and noise for a bit before I can say anymore. - savidgereads.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/beside-the-sea-veronique-olmi/

 What would drive a mother to kill her own children? Why would she do that? Which mother ever does that? What must be the situation or circumstance that propelled such behaviour? I had these questions raging in my mind, when I read about 3 weeks ago in the local newspaper, that a woman had flung her 2 children – aged 6 and 11 years old and then took the path of suicide herself. She could not handle the stress at home and her husband wasn’t supportive of her choices either. I stared at her picture for the longest time and then it struck me that I studied with her. She was almost my classmate. We knew each other. I had once upon a time laughed with her. I could not get her out of my head for the longest time and she still lingers there somehow.
The reason I mentioned all of this is when I started reading, “Beside the Sea”, my thoughts time and again centred on her and her children. The book is about a nameless mother and her two children Stan and Kevin and their trip beside the sea. The story is set in a nameless town – grey and dark and full of rain and mud. There is no mention of any colour in the entire book and may be that is how it is supposed to be, given the plot and the atmosphere. Well the story hinges on the two day trip and aftermath. I had to give the spoiler away since I had to mention what I was going through and what I had experienced.
This is no joyful jaunt to sun, surf and sand. Instead, we discover a deeply disturbed mother, already on the edge, afraid for the life of poverty and exclusion that she fears her boys are destined to lead. Determined to give them at least one happy memory, she takes them on a holiday that she cannot afford and has not properly planned.
We are introduced to the two little boys, Stan and Kevin, through the eyes of their mother allowing us to develop a proxy parental concern for them. The story is told from within their mother’s mind but she remains nameless, allowing us to feel empathy for her while still keeping her at arms distance.
Seeing the experiences of this family through the eyes of the boys gives a sense of wonder and delight, but the covering veil of the mother’s thoughts and emotions and the constant presence of rain give the story a continual sense of darkness that leads to a disharmony – a sense that something is not quite right.
My head was empty when I finished reading this book. I don’t know why. I know and yet the book shook me in several ways, ways I did not think it was capable of. The book takes you by surprise (or may be by shock?) and manages to make you think long after you have finished reading the book. I thought the translation was perfect considering it was originally written in French by Veronique Olmi. The writing is perfect, neither too less and nor too much – anyway that’s how a novella should be written, isn’t it? I did not want to know more at the end of it. I was satisfied. I have had a roller-coaster of an emotional ride while reading this beautiful work. So must you.  - thehungryreader.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/book-review-beside-the-sea-by-veronique-olmi/


I love Véronique Olmi’s Beside The Sea and I’m in good company: Beside The Sea has been hailed as a masterpiece wherever its been published. Translated into all major European languages, it is a bestseller in Germany and France. Long-listed for the 2011 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and named one of Booktrust’s Top Five Translated Books of 2010. Adriana Hunter’s stunning translation won a Scott Montcrieff Prize.
Now there’s no use in obscuring the fact: Beside The Sea is a startlingly dark and disturbing book. A single mother takes her two young sons on their first vacation to the seaside, and it’s clear almost from the start that it will be their last. Fear of an unkind world gets tangled in her mind with the love for her children and her need to protect them. You’re forced to read, through the cracks between your fingers, as a tragedy unfolds: In an act of love, she kills her children.
Beside The Sea is nothing if not provocative. In the office we have two distinct camps—those who feel sympathy for the mother, and those who find her irredeemable.  During our debates we stumbled upon a youtube video, Veronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea: Law, Psychiatry and the Moral Dilemmas of Filicide, a lecture delivered by Dr. Ruth Cain from Kent University.  At one point in the lecture Dr. Cain addresses the class, stating: “Literature brings us to an acknowledgment of situations which I think that legal reports, media reports simply don’t do. This has really reinforced my impression that we need to engage on a literary level with these tragedies.”
I couldn’t agree more. Dr. Cain and I began corresponding over e-mail and she was kind enough to answer a few of my questions.
Nanci McCloskey: If Veronique Olmi’s novel, Beside The Sea were presented as a case in a court of law, what do you think would be the verdict?
Dr. Ruth Cain: I am not a scholar of US law, but I find it likely that the mother would be convicted of murder or voluntary manslaughter given her clear intent to kill the boys. If her mental state were taken into account she may be ruled not guilty by reason of insanity and given psychiatric treatment. Sentencing patterns have been historically variable, but are recently showing an increasing tendency to punish filicide and infanticide as murder and with penal terms.
In most countries, ‘insanity’ requires a state of mind where the defendant cannot recognise that her actions are wrong. Andrea Yates‘ case illustrated this: the fact that Yates expressed a sense of ‘sin’ and guilt despite also appearing psychotic and delusional at the time of the act meant that she was initially convicted of murder and only received into psychiatric care following a retrial 5 years later.
NM: Is the mother in Beside the Sea legally culpable? Personally, do you feel the same?
RC: The acts she has committed are undeniably homicide, specifically filicide: the non-accidental killing of a child. Even if a concept of diminished responsibility or ‘involuntariness’ is accepted in the case of a woman who is clearly suffering from enormous mental, emotional and social problems, the charge would be likely to stand unless the court were to be convinced by psychiatric reports that the mother was indeed insane, and unable to recognise that her actions were wrong. Given the motivations and thoughts which the novel describes, this is indeed a possibility; but it is not clear that the mother’s ‘madness’ would meet the legal definition of insanity in most jurisdictions, as her act is well planned and she has functioned relatively normally up to the moment of the act, etc. The mother believes herself to be saving her sons from poverty and misery, and sending them together into a better afterlife; these motivations which include the effects of social exclusion and pressure on the mother as well as psychiatric delusion may not be recuperable into a narrative of legal insanity.
In my own view, as a feminist scholar of these types of crimes, I simply cannot separate the awful nature of the act from the clearly horrendous personal suffering and rock-bottom social position of the mother. As stated in my lecture, the snuffing-out of the boys’ promising lives demands recognition: but when I look at the mother’s life in poverty and isolation, subject to judgment from a social structure which has left her without any real assistance in bringing up her children alone, I cannot separate these dehumanising and maddening pressures from her terrible and irrational decision to end their lives. The mother’s suffering combined with the damage she does to those in her power forces us to confront the ramifications of social damage and the ways in which psychiatric ‘disorder’ masks social injury and neglect such that families are literally left to rot. In the increasingly punitive neoliberal climate of ‘personal responsibility’ for poverty and failure of any kind, these questions are central and will never be easily answered. Who or what might be called to account for neglect or abuse of the mother here? Responsibility for this act is in my opinion diffuse, spread over a variety of institutions and endemic within an unequal social structure.

NM: Culturally, legally, and medically, we have, as a society, constructed an image of the perfect mother. Does this construct fail the mother-narrator in Beside the Sea?
RC: Clearly this mother has never had a chance to embody the ‘perfect mother’. In rough terms, the ‘perfect’ mother of media, cultural, political and legal mythology is resourceful (that is not poor), all-giving to the point of self-sacrifice, devoted to her offspring 24 hours per day, and (crucially) compliant with broader social imperatives to make the ‘right choices’ for on and on behalf of her children and bring up the right kind of citizen: a good worker, healthy and well-nourished, personally responsible, productive and law-abiding. She also conforms to highly traditional gender norms, in that her devotion is usually carried out within the context of economic support by a higher-earning man. (The moral position of the working mother remains crucially uncertain even in the 21st century).
The mother in this novel fails on almost all points: she is unmarried, without the support of another parent (in traditional discourse an economically supportive male). She is apparently unemployed and under the surveillance of social services. She lacks the material resources implicit to the construct of all-providing motherhood. In her confusion, depression and distress she makes clear mistakes such as leaving Kevin uncollected at school and relying on Stan, still a child, to undertake his basic care. Fundamentally, the construct of the good mother as eternally self-sacrificing excludes a mother who kills: implicitly, a good mother would suffer any privation or pain rather than kill her own children. She is however devoted, caring, inventive and attentive to her sons, as the novel frequently attests: she has brought up polite, interesting, intelligent and loving sons. Her sons are her whole life, as the paradigm of loving motherhood would demand. This is one of the greatest tragedies of the book: that the achievements of the mother are lost both to her (as a depressed and deprived woman suffering shame and low self esteem) and to the outside world, even before she commits her final act of despair. She has been written off already, it seems, by herself and others.
NM: There was a lot of debate around our office. Some felt pity and sympathized with the mother’s situation. Others felt like she was a monster. How can a character like the mother in Beside the Sea and mothers in popular culture guilty of filicide inspire such separate (and strong) reactions?
RC: Precisely because of the centrality of the construct of selfless mother-love to our culture and indeed to our Western concept of subjectivity- increasingly fraught with anxiety, now that we are constructed as a society of fundamentally self-interested individuals- and because of the historical polarisation of mothering into all-good/all-bad. Ambivalent actions or feelings in mothers are socially and culturally unacceptable, despite the fact that they so obviously occur and exist.
The construct of the ‘monstrous mother’ has deep cultural resonance and is even argued to be the basis of many horror narratives; it combines the inevitable vulnerability of the child-subject we have all once been with the low social status and ‘abject’ sexualised/pathologised nature ascribed to women, to create a potent image of the truly unnatural and evil monster (there are many references for these points; I can supply on request). The sensationalised fetish of the monster-mother helps to draw attention away from the social determinants of child cruelty, murder and other tragedies, allowing collective rage and fear to be targeted at an apparently ultimately and solely (ir)responsible individual.
NM: How do you respond to the fact that mothers who commit filicide will almost always receive different sentences than fathers who commit like crimes? When mothers are granted leniency in court, do you see this as a result of the increased medicalization of maternal depression and mental illness or is it more of a defense for society’s ideal of the mother?
RC: I would suggest that since such women have crucially failed to embody a maternal ideal, the lower sentencing of women offenders is more likely to be due to a certain (and limited) recognition of the hugely difficult circumstances in which mothers tend to kill. The fact that women are usually primary carers and are generally (particularly if lone parents) in poverty or suffering from mental distress and/or confusion at the time of the offence is still taken into account in sentencing. The medicalised view adopted in the UK infanticide legislation, that women may be somehow biologically affected by childbirth or lactation for up to one year (a medically unproven claim), does not apply to filicide convictions for the killing of older children: evidence of long-term depression or other mental illness, which may sometimes be inferred from the circumstances of the act, may allow for a medicalised verdict of insanity or diminished responsibility for filicide as mentioned above. The social and to a lesser extent medical factors more rarely apply to male offenders. Women falling outside the normative specification of the ‘vulnerable’ or mentally-ill offender are more frequently given penal sentences, as in the case of Theresa Riggi, a woman who was not in poverty and appears to have killed her children as a result of a high-conflict separation from their father. She received a sixteen-year sentence for ‘culpable homicide’ (an offence equivalent to manslaughter). Evidence of ‘personality disorders’ did not significantly lessen her sentence and her ‘glamorous’ appearance was frequently and disapprovingly noted in media reports of her trial. There is also, however, evidence that women from working-class backgrounds and with long-term histories of mental distress, criminality or addiction may also be more likely to be incarcerated, showing that class is an issue in sentencing, as with all crimes.
NM: Although we never actually see the social worker or the psychologist in Beside the Sea, we are aware of the burden of their presence on the narrator-mother. How do the roles of the social worker and psychologist factor into the final crime, if at all?
RC: The social worker and psychologist’s ineffective ‘support’ is, I think, an important way in which the author draws our attention to the matrix of control and surveillance within which the mother is forced to live. Implicitly, the attention of the professionals is upon her because she has already been seen to ‘fail’ her sons and has been classified as mentally ill and thus abnormal. Her abnormality is clearly also economic: she is being treated as one of an ‘underclass’, and any support she is offered combines with injunctions to improve herself, and to behave as if she were not suffering deprivation and despair. The general patronising disapproval of the social worker and her inability to understand the positive ways the mother in the novel expresses love and care for her sons (for example the provision of an entire wall for Kevin to draw on as he wishes!) suggest that real, personalised support for the mother’s clear difficulties in caring at all times adequately for her sons and for herself is lacking. She is instead enjoined by the psychologist to think positive and control her feelings and reactions- an illustration of the depersonalising kind of medicalisation and subsequent individualisation of personal distress frequently caused by socioeconomic and gender factors.
NM:  When reading was there ever a moment where you felt if someone had intervened, if someone had offered help the outcome would have changed?
RC: Clearly anything to relieve the mother’s isolation and emotional pain would have helped her: but whether this is friendship, state-sponsored childcare or home help, better medical treatment, more money, or all these things, is impossible to specify. Personally I was struck particularly by her isolation as well as her poverty. The boys were literally all she had. This made it easier for me to understand, for example, her jealousy of the teacher of whom Kevin is so fond, and her wish to stop Stan from growing away from her. Clearly she was a woman neglected in many ways (the social worker seems more concerned to criticise her or give her instructions than to help; she has missing teeth, implying a lack of access to health care, a poor diet, or subjection to violence; she is quite clearly very poor). While friendship, family support or a partner might have helped at some point, the fact that this mother is already an ‘outcast’ at the beginning of the book suggests that she may have become isolated as a result of her needs, illnesses and losses, since the weak and needy are socially excluded: another point of unbearable pathos in the book.
NM: It is shocking to search these crimes on the internet—there are many examples, just from the past few months. Why are acts of filicide on the rise?
RC: I am not clear that filicide is rising.  I cannot find anything in my research to suggest a very clear upward trend. It is probable that reporting has increased in frequency and luridness, as social anxiety about the family and mothering have spiraled. I predict a rise in my lecture, but this is based on my own ideas that in the age of Western austerity, social instability and increasing isolation will lead to an increase in crime and domestic violence of all kinds. There is no proof as yet that I am correct, and indeed I hope I am not!
NM: In the context of our current politics, culture, and lifestyle, why is reading and talking about a book like Beside the Sea so important?
RC: For the precise reason that such crimes are considered and classified as unthinkable, unspeakable, and yet still happen and will continue to happen; and because anything beyond a cursory or sensationalist analysis makes clear that the people who commit them cannot be simply stigmatised (and thus cast from public view) as ‘monsters’. The social determinants of infanticide and filicide are very clear and are also consonant with those of all crime and violence: poverty, low social status, isolation, resultant mental distress and inability to access help and support. In the case of maternal filicide, the female perpetrator represents a limit-point for sympathy and advocacy: this is precisely why she is such an important figure. Denial of the context of her crime simply creates an ultimately meaningless narrative of personal evil (or alternately, a simple medicalisation of her ‘madness’) which negates the clear impact of mothering in conditions of severe deprivation. In a time of increasingly harsh and reflexive moral judgments and shrill public blaming, of which ‘imperfect’ and particularly poor or lone mothers receive a disproportionate share, attention to the context of the crime and the story of the perpetrator is not simply fair but politically necessary. - Dr. Ruth Cain